Challenge

The individual brands that form Elevate Outdoor Collective have long set the standard for product innovation and quality in skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoeing. To build on this history of independent innovation, they joined together as a collective in 2022 to benefit from shared development facilities and global distribution channels.

The company sought to improve efficiency by simplifying workflows related to payment processing, reconciliation, and accounting. The US and Canada regions used separate payment processors and enterprise resource platforms (ERPs), leading to significant time spent reconciling transactions every month—manually, in some cases—and difficulty matching orders with invoices.

“We were looking to speed up the accounts receivable and accounts payable reconciliation process,” said Travis Hahn, vice president of global IT at Elevate Outdoor Collective. “By moving to a single payment processor, we were aiming for downstream time saved for the finance team as well as simplified payment processing that could scale with the company as it grows.”

Stripe’s ease of self-service and developer-friendly platform made it Elevate’s top choice. “The Stripe Dashboard allows us to easily adjust our services and functionality without deep technical experience or Stripe customer service assistance,” said Hahn. “We can add payment options with the click of a button, and the clean APIs, robust SDKs, and best-in-class documentation shorten launch timelines and reduce long-term development costs.”

After selecting Stripe as its payment processor and NetSuite as the ERP for Canada and the US, Elevate faced the challenge of integrating Stripe and NetSuite alongside other systems in its technology infrastructure, including: ecommerce platform BigCommerce, which directly integrated with Stripe to process payments; iPaaS provider Celigo, which transferred BigCommerce order data to NetSuite; and Avalara, the tax engine used for BigCommerce orders.

Recognizing that its in-house team couldn’t effectively manage the integration alone, Elevate looked for a Stripe Specialized Partner to help create a seamless flow between front-end payment processing, middleware, and ERP.

Solution

Elevate asked Stripe to recommend experts that could navigate the integration of the company’s entire tech stack. Stripe suggested Oakland-based Nova Module, developers of cloud-based integrations with a focus on omnichannel commerce, knowing that Nova Module’s product PayPack—a no-code, same-day integration solution—could form the basis of a custom solution enabling direct access to Stripe from NetSuite.

The engagement between Nova Module and Elevate began in March 2024 with a specialized consulting session for Stripe merchants designed by Nova Module to understand a company’s business process workflows and technical requirements in the context of its broader goals. “It wasn’t a typical requirements-gathering,” said Danny Lee, ERP project manager at Elevate Outdoor Collective. “Nova Module was quickly able to take our use cases and dissect them down to three or four custom flows.”

Through that process, Nova Module discovered several payment requirements that Elevate’s consolidated system would need to handle, including capturing multiple payments within a single order, authorizing payments at checkout and capturing them after fulfillment, replacing a legacy system for customer installment payment plans, and handling refunds or cancellations. The integration’s success also depended on meeting the requirements of stakeholders from multiple departments, including finance, IT, ecommerce, and customer service.

“The functional consultants from Nova Module laid out a plan to help us understand the process as it was being developed,” said Hahn. “When we’d hit a challenge in the implementation, they brought in experts in that area—Stripe account maintenance inside BigCommerce, for example—and coordinated calls between our team and BigCommerce to address those issues.”

In some cases, Nova Module navigated the complexity of stitching together multiple existing systems. For example, Nova Module employed Celigo Integrator.io flows to automatically transfer payments, refunds, and cancellations data from Stripe and BigCommerce into NetSuite. Once that data was inside NetSuite, Elevate could employ Nova Module’s prebuilt PayPack solution to process transactions, sync payment records, and manage payment information from Stripe without leaving NetSuite. “PayPack really saved the day for a lot of the automation,” said Lee.

Other aspects of the integration required more customized development by Nova Module. For example, to replace a legacy system for customer installment payments, the Nova Module team created a new installment payment plan in Stripe using modified NetSuite scripts. “The Nova Module team were very attentive to what we wanted to accomplish, and they understood our goals every step of the way,” said Hahn.

Once Nova Module had solidly integrated the end points of Stripe, BigCommerce, and NetSuite, Elevate used Stripe Elements, a set of embeddable UI components including the Payment Element, to improve the frontend experience and easily add payment methods like ACH Direct Debits, Apple Pay, and more through a single integration. It also includes AI models that dynamically present the most relevant payment method for every transaction. Elevate also added Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams for the majority of its brand accounts in April 2023 following an uptick in fraudulent transactions during its busy winter shopping season.

Results

Unifying US and Canada regions onto Stripe and NetSuite saves time and money

Nova Module successfully reduced Elevate’s need for two payment processors and two ERPs to one of each, enabling reliable syncing of transactions between the front- and backends. Having fewer third-party vendors has lowered ongoing maintenance costs and freed up engineering resources for other business priorities.

Even while managing the complexity of Elevate’s multiple Stripe accounts and dual business lines, as well as performing rigorous testing and validation, Nova Module met Elevate’s planned “go-live” month of October 2024.

Automated payment capture eliminates slow, manual process

Prior to the integration, Elevate’s finance team had to manually apply all payments captured through the 24 Stripe accounts (1 ecommerce account for each of 12 brands, in both Canada and the US) into the company’s 2 ERP systems as paid invoices. The custom Celigo workflow engineered by Nova Module now automatically integrates payment capture IDs to NetSuite, where they are matched with the appropriate transaction.

Reconciliation time reduced by 50%

Elevate’s finance team gained significant time savings from Nova Module’s solution, as reconciliation time for accounts payable and accounts receivable has declined from 10 days to 5 days per month as a result of Stripe’s automation and simplification of the reconciliation process. The team anticipates even greater time savings down the line as they are able to scale with Stripe as the company’s sole payment processor.

Updated installment plan saves processing time

By implementing Nova Module’s PayPack installment plan, Elevate Outdoor Collective significantly reduced payment processing time and improved customer convenience. “The PayPack installment plan is a nice addition in NetSuite,” said Hahn. “Our customers can save their payment details to Stripe securely, and our credit team appreciates the easy set-up for payments and the time saved by payments being posted within NetSuite.”

Ease of adding local payment methods facilitates international expansion

By easily adding local payment options with the Payment Element—paired with Stripe’s turnkey compliance solutions—Elevate anticipates a smoother path to international expansion. “We’re hoping to achieve accelerated market entry with Stripe’s global reach, built-in multicurrency support, and local payment methods,” said Hahn.

Radar for Fraud Teams lowers disputes significantly

In the two years since activating Radar for Fraud Teams across most of its brands, Elevate has seen a substantial reduction in disputes. By brand, disputed transactions have fallen by approximately 98% for MARKER Bindings, Backcountry, and LINE Skis, and reduced by 90% for RIDE.

About Partner

Nova Module empowers businesses of all sizes—from startups to global enterprises—with cutting-edge expertise and innovative solutions, enabling them to achieve their global vision and sustain long-term growth.